preschool

(the above are all "e" week pictures but...
I put on 2 hrs of preschool for garrett and 5 friends every Wednesday. We just do it for fun. Last week was the best so far! (weeks previous g was the only child not listening and running amuck- but he did it finally! woohoo) anyways last year when i traded off with these moms my SIL wanted me to post the details- i never did but i've kept track this time. heres what we've done so far:

we sit on a rug in front of a pocket chart that displays our letter of the week and flashcard looking things of the words of the week. we sing " d says duh d says duh every letter makes a sound d says duh" or whatever letter we're working on

A: ant, apple
B: bat, bakery, ball, butterfly, _____
we bought a kit from insect lore and watched the caterpillars go into cocoons and hatch these past few weeks since "butterfly"
copy me symetry game on a butterfly shaped mat- i layed something down on a spot on my side of the butterfly and the child did the same on the other side
butterfly symetry art (paint one half of butterfly paper and then fold to get same design on other side)

yeah my memory from the first two weeks isnt there and im too lazy to go look in the notebook.

C: color, caterpillar, circus, cereal, castle
1. sorted toys by color
2. color wheel- ive misplaced the paintbrushes so we tried with colored pencils and it really didnt work out well- jen had the great idea of showing your kids color mixing with food coloring instead too make up for this flop. sorry.
3. talked about the importance of eating a rainbow of foods to keep our bdies healthy (used our color wheel plates and some food pictures to put something of each color on our plates)
4. read the Very Hungry Caterpillar while glueing the sequencing cards of the story on our construction paper by the day of the week- you could use the paper to have the kids retell the story putting emphasis on day of the week, number of things he ate each day, or color of food he ate that day
5. acted out the lifecycle of a caterpillar- egg, caterpillar, cocoon (pillow case) and finally butterfly (our cateroillars didnt come in the mail until wed afternoon so hopefully they will still be caterpillars next wed. and we can witness the cocoon and hatching too)
6. added days of the week to our calendar and sang days of the week song to tune of adams family theme song
7. read Olivia saves the circus while glueing cereal in the shape of "c"
8. sorted our weekly words into hard and soft c sounds

D: dance, Daniel, dentist, dolphin, dinosaur

i layed towels out in different shapes: circle, square, triangle, Diamond and we danced aroudn the shape to different kinds of music

distance: made a map of the zoo in Good night gorilla and counted the number of zoo keeper steps it took to get from cage to cage

http://www.bibleforchildren.org/PDFs/english/Daniel%20and%20the%20Lions%20Den%20English.pdf watched the story of daniel in the lions den

discussed dentist office visits and watched a youtube video of a kids first visit

scrubbed the bottom of an empty small coke bottle with baking soda and water to mimic brushing our teeth

snack: oreos and apple slices- oour dentist wants us to eata snacks that keep our teeth clean like apples but its ok to eat snacks like oreos we just have to brush our teeth really good

read Dolphins first day

dug in the sand to find dinosaurs like real scientist
polka-dotted a letter "D"

read Elves and the shoe maker
answered some riddles about body parts that start with e like ear eye and elbow
everyones favorite was singing hokey pokey using the e boday parts and additional part including the ever popular " bum" (just in case you are wondering if they are really singing about shaking your bum all about)
did exercise to a kids workout dvd- hillarious! they lasted about 5 min but all did really well
centers:
ewww bag- bag of slime featured on play at home moms for practice writing "E"
elephant face building with shapes of construction paper
egg match- match the uppercase letter to the lower case letter
color sort (no correlation to e week)
counting beans in egg carton
felt board story of Esther found at chocolate on my cranium
discussion of emperors followed by slide show of china
made china flag by looking at a picture and putting everything in the right place on their copy with no help from me

save the day!

a villain left us a note abotu how he had captured the superheroes and handed them off to dr. doom in his helicopter. when we ran over there we found another note that said we were too slow and he had taken them to the tallest tower which was really dr. octopus' lab.

we climbed to the top of the playground and they were already gone. we had to go down the swirly twirly drop to look for them.

dr. octopus was waiting for us at the bottom but nowthe sandman had taken the heroes and burried them.

we dug in the sand box to save spiderman, ironman, andcaptain america

next we had cupcakes in celebration of saving the day and of course in celbration of garrett's birthday.

superhero training

1. crawl through your batcave

2. fly over the city
3. use your shield to knock down the wall- seen below

4. shoot spiderwebs at a villain

Garrett decided to wear a friend's superman costume. im so glad look how cute he was!

here's some other heroes enjoying their training

outfitting the heroes

everyone got a cape when they arrived and then we went to work decorating shields- cause every good superhero needs a shield.

calling all superheroes!

Garrett had a friend party this year- superhero style. I loved planning it. He still talks about it so i think it was a success! we're going to break this up into a couple posts just for my sanity in uploading pictures- cause we all know im horrible at that :)

Birthday week

Of course these blasted pictures are in here in reverse order. oh well. better than nothing.

So im new to this two birthdays in one week thing. Its something ill learn to deal with and handle better in the future as their birthdays will always be 5 days apart. :)

Papi and Ahbi were so sweet to make birthdays a priority by coming out for a visit. Papi wasant going to be here for the whole week so we lived it up at Chuck E. Cheese- his treat.

On Garrett's actual day we had a re-do at an icecream cake- this time a more generic style for both birthdays. Gar enjoyed a cars shake and go track and 4 cars, super hero and toy story clothes and pjs, mcd's giftcard, movie and vending machine money.

On Jocie's day the morning was all hers though she had a party in WA at Maga's house. She loved her doll gear, books, purse, phone, clothes, mcds card and cookies with her vending machine money.











I so love being the mom of these two and hope to make their days happy for a long time.

sunriver

allison and ashley were the best big kid helpers for paige and garrett at this awesome bounce house we found while the boys golfed.

there was tons to do even for little jocie and brayden

sweet paigey pie

i love when jocie raises her eyebrows like this! too cute- i hope i remember this face forever

isnt brayden so handsome? im a lucky aunt

she was in heaven. wish we found a place liek this in miami

crafts by kristene! thanks so much fun- we made wood blocks with a pic of portland temple that said "im going there someday"

even grandpa helped garrett make one

we played lots of fun minute to win it games. i cant figure out howto get a hilaarious video posted here of garrett trying to shake 40 ping pong balls out of a box on his bum.

we loved the bounce house place so much we went back later that week witht daddy

we explored lavalands with the Dabbs. i learned that NASA practiced with the moon buggy thing here first before they took it up to the moon. cool

best of all we had lots of little cut ething slike this happen (jocie following brayden through the coffee table) we so LOVED bonding with extended family that we miss A LOT

grandpa and grandma judged a "Chopped" competitionwe all cooked for

fun lake day ( that i probably was a little party pooper for- sorry) Garrett on the paddle boat with hmmm.. allison, ashley, denise, and paige. geoff also enjoyed the wave runnerr thingy and i... did not. hehehe

im missing lots from this week but we sure did enjoy the time with family. thanks everyone for making it a priority.